Seminario Yamir Moreno: "From Small to Big data: The Physics of Human Behavior"

Abstract: Physics has been extremely successful in describing our natural world, from the very small to the very large scales. However, as we will argue in this talk, the study of human collective behavior is not as easy as dealing, for instance, with ideal gases. The reasons are multiple, among which one can mention the fact that we do not know what are the laws describing most human behaviors and that in many dynamical processes details really matter. This calls for the analysis of human behavioral data, in some cases small, in some other cases big, but also at intermediate scales. Through the dissemblance of 3 different examples of human collective behavior and using data at different scales, we will show what are the experimental (data) and theoretical challenges in the study of social systems and propose a way to tackle such problems.